TVEA President School Board Public Comments
Good Evening,
As our teacher’s elected and designated spokesperson, I feel compelled tonight to speak on the TVUSD fiscal deficit. The audience thus far has been polite and subdued yet that is not reflective of their angst.
Our members are waiting for those at the top of the TVUSD pyramid to lead from the front. TVUSD needs to be explicitly clear on what staffing and individual sacrifices those at the head of the organization will make.
To date, TVUSD’s commitment of $800,000 in unspecified district cuts is less than 1/3 of 1% in a $285 million- dollar budget. This pales in comparison to the commitments of other struggling districts.
I posed a series of budget questions to both the Superintendent and Governing Board over the last week. I have received in return a series of what a fellow TVEA member accurately termed “Apathetic Deflections and Inadequate Explanations”.
Collectively, the Governing Board appears to be somewhere between a state of denial and being dumbfounded about TVUSD’s budgetary choices and their fiscal impact. The common district and board buzzword to address the budget deficit is “Collaboration”
It does not feel very collaborative when your membership is losing 54.6 positions and livelihoods while the district toll tonight consists of TWO administrative reassignments, both for personal reasons.
It does not feel very collaborative that reportedly TVUSD administrators are already communicating 2017-18 LCAP job duties to LCAP Personnel. I understood the LCAP “Collaborative” process still had much play in it with pending District Survey Results as well as CAP, DELAC, and TVEA Consult meetings scheduled over the next six weeks.
It does not feel very collaborative when the district repeatedly states, “Our ultimate goal is to utilize retirements and attritions to make reductions”. How is this game plan progressing? We have seen nothing.
When given an opportunity to mitigate the deficit through changes to elementary class size via bargaining, the district decided that mandatory elementary PLC meetings could not be reduced as an exchange.
The only thing being reduced tonight are 54.6 of our member positions who directly serve students.
This is Collaboration?
